Fraught with Fire:

Cisristimlity and Litemture Vol. 59, No.2 (Winter 20/0)

Race and Theology in Marilynne Robinson's Gilead

Lisa M. Siefker Bai ley

Written in the form of a spiraling letter with qualities of a sermon, a meditation, a diary. and a journal, Marilynne Robinson's Gilead offers a reflection of both lamentation and celebration but ends with a hope for a restoration Robinson presents as transcendence. Due to his terminal heart condition, the letter's author, Congregationalist minister John Ames. knows he will not spend much time with his son on earth. Ames laments this fact through words he hopes will allow him to connect in deep meaningful ways with the grown son he is destined not to know in Ihis life. Ames writes this letter with the sa me zeal he wrote sermons in his career, sermons which willialer be burned. As Ames faces the mystery of death, he becomes ever closer to God, both spiritually and literally. For Christians like Ames. there's life after death. Here on earth, there is something good in the mystery of what he doesn't understand. Robinson suggests a transcendent notion of Christianity that encompasses both larger mysteries. One way Robinson represents these mysteries is through the shifting and contrary symbol of fi re. The novel is so rich with images of fire that Elle book reviewer Lisa Shea calls Gilead "laJn inspired work from a writer whose sensibility seems steeped in holy fire" (J 70). Ames' story uses fire as a representation of the energy ofheing, which can become destructive like the puritanical mistakes made in Ames' grandfather's church. or transcendent. like the filling of the Holy Spiri !. 1

We have seen Robinson use images of water, air, earth, and fi re in HOllsekeeping. Stefan Mattessich has suggested that fire in HOllsekeeping provides a Derridean metaphor of spirit (75). Mattessich points out that Sylvie's bonfire which burns her collection of magazines and newspapers becomes a kind of "fire-writing" that helps to draw boundaries around social norms in communication (75-76). "What goes up in flames for Ruth and Sylvie:' writes Mattessich, "is the world of these norms" (76). Mattessich

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uses Derrida to suggest that fire in Housekeeping works as a force that allows Sylvie and Ruth to break free of the social norms of Fingerbone and al the same time "fold them back into it" (76) as they become drifters in and around it. Mattessich then demonstrates that Sylvie and Ruth have ambivalence about the world. and he eventually argues Ihal Robinson shows that "nuctuations of the spirit are at their Illost material and the sacred is indeed acutest at its vanishing" (83). 1his sentiment is also true in Gilead, where Ames understands his faith, his own spirit if you will, and the very essence of others best when he is closest to losing his life and thus all connection with them. Unlike HOllsekeepillg in which, as Mattcssich notes, fire docs not enter until late in the novel, fire pops up everywhere in Gilead, from the sermons in the attic to his grandfather's lctter that Ames burned, from the Negro church to the fireflies in the yard.~ Maltessich reminds us that, at the end of HOllsekeeping, we never know "whcther the house survives the fire or not" (76). The same is true of Ames' sermons and of the letter he is writing. At the end of the novel, we come to the end of Ames' life, and Ames suggcsts that Robert ask Lila to have the deacons arrange to "have those old sermons of mine burned .... There are enough to make a good fire. I'm thinking here of hot dogs and marshmallows, something 10 celebrate the first snow. Of course shc can set by any of them she might want to keep" (Robinson, Gilead 245). Just as we are unable to tell whether or not the house survives the fire at the end of Housekeeping, we are unable to Icarn whethcr or not Ames' sermons survive the fire he requests.

While fire in HOllsekeepillg becomes a symbol of bot h disenfranchisement and power that changcs social norms and main characters, fire in Gilead represents both the destructive forces of society and the power of the spirit, in both the Holy Spirit of the triune God and the spirit of humanity, sent by God and sharcd by peoplc. 111C Holy Spirit appears in Acts 2 on the day of Pentecost as fire that rests on the apostles. That fire allows the apostles to speak in tongues and spread the word of God. Without this gift of the Holy Spirit, the apostles would be restricted to witnessing to those who could understand their hlllguage. The fire of Pentecost is a contrary symbol because it flames but does not burn. Likewise, the word of God shifts throughout the triune God as it is eternal in the F,lIher, becomes flesh in the son, and is spread by the Holy Spirit. Ames is keenly aware of the contraries embodied in images and shifts of meaning in words. He realizes that, ifhis son received his tetter, his son may not envision or interpret his words the way he mcant them. For that matter, Ames seems aware thnt Jack Boughton does not interpret his words the way Ames means, and that old Boughton

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may not either. Ames, too, (mis)reads the relationship between Lila and Jack. His age and experience. howe\'er, do give him a bit of wisdom that he could not have had as a younger man. And more importantly, he has belief, faith in things unseen, including a faith that he is in a beautiful world that is good because God made it so. Ames attempts to see and to help assuage the pain of those around him, and he desperately looks for the good in all. Even when he cannot see good directly, he seeks it. "I believe there are visions that come to LIS only in memory, in retrospect. That's the pulpit speaking, but it's telling the truth" (Gilead 91). In th is case, Ames is confident of the success in his sermonic articulation of this idea. The mystery of it lies in understanding the vision through memory. Memory is a construction. and Ames hopes to const ruct love in the memories he has as well as those he creates in th is letter, even as he acknowledges the difficulty in doing so. Ames remarks, "Remembering and forgiving can be contrary things" ([64). Remembering for Ames encompasses pains, griefs, and losses. His "endless letter" both rejoices in the transcendent possibility of connecting with his son after his death and is reminiscent of a jeremiad, as a long letter which laments the loss of a relationship wit h hisson.) Ames' collection of memories in his letter, however, ends wit h the promise of redempt ion. Ames is awa re of the prophecy of the end times: "I suppose it's natural to think about those old boxes of sermons upstairs. They are a record of my life, after all, a sort of foretaste of the Last Judgment, really. so how can I not be curious?" (Gilead 41). Using language reflective of the sacrament of communion, in which Christians receive a "foretaste of the feast to come," Robinson weaves in apocalyptic language that smacks of both law and of gospel. rt is the record of his life that would condemn it, but it is God's grace that would save it. As George T. Montague explains when he traces images of the Holy Spirit from its cleansing judgment in Isaiah, "When the Lord ... purges Jerusalem's blood from her midst with the spirit of judgment and the spirit of fire" to the New Testament images "which Jesus explains to the disciples of John the Baptist that he has not come to apply the heavenly blow-torch to his people but to proclaim the healing mercy of God" (40). lhllS, the fire of the Holy Spirit in the Old Testament judges, and the fi re of the Holy Spirit in the New Testament transforms.

This mystery, the combination of judgment and grace, is embodied in the contrary image offire throughout Gilead. Ames is surrounded by images of sparks that Signal growing fire. Ames does not dwell directly on suffering or lamentations, but his frustrations seep into his narrative as they are

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in herent in his memories and part of the record orhis life. He recalls a night he and Boughton sat on the porch steps watch ing fireflies, and Boughton remarked:

"Man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upward:' And really, it was that night as if the earth were smoldering. Well it was, and it is. An old fi re will make a dark husk for itself and settle in on its core, as in the case of this pbnet. I believe the same metaphor rna)' describe the human individual, as well. Perhaps Gilead. Perhaps civilization. Prod a little and the sparks will fly. (Gilead 72)

The burn ing of the Negro church, which he has reduced in his mind to a small incident, the civil righ ts movement burgeoning in the south, and a great many olher sparks glow around him. But unless he looks for them or prods Ihem, he is unaware of such issues. He concerns himself with his own worries, which are so narrow Ihal he covets the friendship his younger wife has with Jack, even though Jack is wounded and wea ry, 3 nea rly broken soul.

As Ames narrates the story of his life and ponders those around him. his vision is fraugh t with fire, fire thai often represents annihi lat ion of sinners and the painful loss of those who feel sin's gUilt and the loss of compassion that such destruction leaves behind. These fire images are used in several ways. First, the "rascally young fellows" joking after work are covered in so much black grease and strong gasoline that Ames wonde rs "why they don't catch fire themselves" (Gilead 5). Ames finds them a thi ng of beauty, walking quotidian poetry. In contrast, Ames did not realize at Ihe time how much anger there was in the fire that destroyed the Negro church. In warning, he cautions his son, "A little too much anger, too often or at the wrong ti me, can destroy more than you would ever imagine" (6). When the church burned, Ames knew the fire was a serious wrong, but no one in Gi lead could imagine the depth of pain it caused the families. No one cou ld imagine the sins of the fathers falling as they do on Jack Boughton and his wife and son, a mirror of Ames' own. Ames receives his wife and son late in life and cannot believe they are his. Jack obtains his wife and son in the prime of his life and also cannot believe they are his. Both, however, are disallowed time to spend wilh their wives and sons. Jack and Ames both end up disenfranchised from their families, Jack by society, and Ames by age.4 Ames is cognizant of the disconnect between himself and his son and realizes the letter he is writing may not even reach its intended recipient. Ames hopes, in language which echoes a Puritanical sermon, that the letter might not be "lost or burned also" (40).

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Not only do Ames' words have the pOlential to be destroyed literally because of fire. but words. even without malicious intent, can become destructive like the church fire. Ames writes, "Above all. mind what you say. 'Behold how much wood is kindled by how small a fire, and the tongue is a fire'-that's the truth. When my father was old he told me that very thing in a letter he sent me. Which. as it happened, I burned" (Gilead 6). No wonder Ames considers that the letter he is writing may be burned. as thai is exactly what he did with his father's letter. Ames seems aware of the irony here and how hard it is for people to learn their lessons. Just before Robinson introduces the first "Negro" in Ames' letter, Ames writes that "one lapse of judgment can qUickly create a situation in which on ly foolish choices are possible" (60). The fire set at the Negro church is the opposite of the fire of the Holy Spirit. The destructive church fire is a representation not of Christlike qualities but of the fa lse representation of God by humans who made a bad choice. The novel is set in 1956. within two years of the landmark case of Browl! V. Board of Education of Topeka and four years after the publication of Ralph Ellison's I/lvisible Mall. Ames' letter does not mention social changes in race relations. and he does not mention any African American authors in his library, even when he describes ordering more books than he ever had time to read. He has "mostly theology. and some old travel books from before the wars" (77). The effects of the fire at the Negro church have kindled results with fa r greater and more damaging consequences than Ames realizes until the last section of the novel when Ames begins to understand Jack's plight.

The tapestry in Ames' grandfather's church proclaimed, "The Lord Our God Is a Purifying Fire" (Gilead 99). Ames writes about how angry his father became because the congregants of that church justified the war wit h that phrase. One woman even called it "just a bit of scripture" (99). Here. Ames continues to explore the nature of how things mean. The people of that church wanted to believe the war they were fighting was sanctioned by God. and they even went so far as to create the gloriOUS tapestry to celebrate God's glory in their fight. This sort of bloodshed, however, inflicts the deep psychological and phYSical wounds that need the balm of Gilead for healing. Just because people want to just ify things as God's will does not make them so. Sometimes God is represented falsely by the church, and such representations come out of man's inability to be pure.~ Ames felt he had a special transcendent communion. a connecting experience with his father after his grandfather's church burned. But as he describes the spiritual way his fa ther fed him the biscuit with ash, Ames writes, "My point here is

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that you never do know the actual nature even of your own experience" (95). The church burned from a desire to control society and to control the hegemony orthe lowll.TIle righteousness of their puritanical errand was a self-glorification al best and a damning crime as viewed by anyone outside their self-justified and self-serving missioll .

Even though he did not burn down the Negro church, Ames is guilty for it, just as he waS drawn in to the things his grandfather did in Kansas. Ames writes:

! was in on the secret, loo- implicated without knowing what I was implicated in. Well, that's the human condition, I suppose. I believe I was implicated, and am, and would have been if J had never seen that pistol. [\ has been my experience that guilt can burst though the smallest breach and cover the landscape, and abide in it in pools and danknesses, just as native as water. (Gilead 82)

Ames sees the sins of the fathers fall upon him. Ames felt his father should hide the gUilt of his father and that he should hide the guilt of h is, but he reveals the rift and the fact that he kept the note his grandfather left. The rift between father and son is emblematic oflarger rifts, for example, in society, the rift of segregation and laws against miscegenation, and, in Christianity. the rift of sin which separates man from paradise and from God. As people are torn apart, those who cross social lines like Jack Boughton become displaced and in a sense erased from both the white culture in towns like Gilead and from black cultu re in cities like MemphiS. Once again, sin causes consequences, not only in continued separation from God, but also in separation from would-be earthly comfort such as family. 111e displacement in both cases causes misunderstanding and confusion, leaving all in a world where no one can see anyone else's situations or intents clearly.

Ames also experiences misunderstanding and confusion and seems blind to the nature of his own experience when Jack visits his house. He does not ask Lila about her past, and he misreads Jack's familiarity with Lila. Ames is so concerned that Jack may take his place as husband and father to them that he cannot see Jack's pain. He is aware of something amiss with Jack. Ames says Jack has always looked to him "like a man standing too dose to a fire, tolerating present pain, knowing he's a half step away from something worse" (Gilead 191). Ames reads Jack's awkward and unsettled nonverbal communication, but Ames does not interpret it correctly. Not until the end of the novel, or even until the end of Home, does the reader

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have a strong idea of why Jack acts the way he does. In her introduction to TIle Death of Adam, Robinson states:

Evidence is alway~ construed, and it is always liable to being misconstrued no matter how much care is exercised in collecting and evaluating it. At best, our understanding of any historical moment is significantly wrong, and this should come as no surprise, since we have little grasp of any given moment. The present is elusive (or the same reasons as is the past. (4)

Robinson's characters often have little understanding of their own moments, the moments of those they love, or of the moments of those they know more remotely through connect ions in society. [n effect, they stand close to each other, the way Jack stood too close to the fire, enduring pain-Jack enduring the pain of courting damnation, and-those close to him enduring the pain of not knowing how to understand what is right next to them. Jack's loved ones try very hard in their own inefficient and unsatisfying ways to reach out to him, to save him, their beloved prodigal. Their work appears to have no effect, however, as Jack always falls back into the same patterns of sin and continues to look like he's standing 100 dose to the fires of hell and damnation . Jack is an everyman here, as all sinners are, the prodigal son unable to make spiritual progress (to move away from fiery damnation) without God's grace.

Fire in Gilead represents both the spiritual progress of the puritanical errand into the wilderness to save those standing too close to the fires of damnation and a herald of the civil rights movement. Robinson also uses fire imagery to transcend those same painful earthly struggles and offer hope of a new vision, the sort of loving transcendent vision Ames' grandfather wrote about in the note he left on the kitchen table (Gilead 85). At the end of the novel, Ames sees not only the fires of bell on earth but also the fire of the righteous God. The ruins of courage and hope seem to Ames but an ember, and be believes "the good Lord will surely someday breathe it into flame again" (246). Gilead does not look like the floor of hell, but it looks "like whatever hope becomes after it begins to weary a little, then weary a little more. But hope deferred is still hope" (Robinson, Gilead 246). Robinson's language here not only references Provo 13: 12 but also calls to mind Langston Hughes' "Harlem [21" in which Hughes asks, "What happens to a dream deferred?" (426). The poem also inspired Lorraine Hansberry to include it at the beginning of her play, A Raisill ill tile SI/II.

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which takes its title from Hughes' third line of the poem and became the first play by an African American woman to win the Drama Desk Award. Robinson's words become yet another renecting mirror as she reminds readers of the histories around words and persons, and how those histories exist whether or nol they can be remembered or understood. Robinson does no! leave Ames impotent in participating in these histories, evell if he does not comprehend his ability to do so. He goes on immediately to write, "I love Ihis town. [ think sometimes of going into the ground here as a last wild gesture of love- I too will smolder away the time until the great and general incandescence" (247). Thus, Ames is empowered with love, the commandment of the gospel, to love his neighbor as himself, and Ames, in the end, is able to feel that love. And for Robinson, love "is probably a synonym for grace" (Robinson, "Further Thoughts" 488). Gilead may not be the city on the hill, but Ames' final vision of it offers hope that people could attain peace and grace in a new world and perhaps reflect some of that future in the present. Ames is able to see and express his desire to offer this "wild gesture of love" as he moves beyond the place Ihat most needs it. It's easy to get bitter and resentful toward God like the Israelites Jeremiah describes when people endure unceasing pain and incurable wounds. Jack, with his doubts and his interminable suffering, epitomizes this waiting and hoping state of humanity. Ames, on the other hand, knows he is 011 the verge of exiling this world and is able to have a glimpse of the perspective of leavi ng it behind.

Before that last moment, however, Ames has suffered with his ailing heart and has already mourned the lossofhis wife and son when he imagines Jack came home to take over his family. The suflering human, blinded by pain, often misperceives God's intentions. In Jeremiah, God promises to deliver the Israelites out of the hands of their enemies and to restore them to him. If sinners return and repent, God will restore them and save them and deliver them from what ails them. A righteous end would be payment for sins, but God does not hold sin against the sinner who believes in Christ and repents, who receives the "free grace of forgiveness" Boughton has struggled with comprehending (Gilead 190). Believers, in turn, are filled with a burning desire from the Holy Spirit to go Ollt and tell olhers so they, too, can experience the same love and righteollsness. One day. and that day comes soon for John Ames, believers will see and know God fully. no more lenses, but face-to-face. Ames describes the phenomenon:

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If the Lord chooses to make nothing of our transgressions, then they are nothing. Or whatever reality they have is trivial and conditional beside the exquisite primary fact of existence. Of course the Lord would wipe them away, just as [ wipe dirt from your face, or lears. After all, why should the Lord bother much over these smirches that are no part of His Creation? ([90)

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So, in Robinson's vision, being becomes more significant than how one is being. Existence itselfis a miracle and part of tile celebration of the mystery of God's grace.

Just as fire destroys in order to create energy, each bit of knowledge and grace subverts the old to make the new. God's grace both crucifies and creates a new self. As Vera J. Camden explains, "The anguish of men like Luther and Bunyan-and many believers-is that the lived experience of this paradox enforces a terrifying abjection, as the old self must be both rejected and retained, the new self both embraced and anticipated."6 Perhaps subverting his old self to make way for a transformed self who can connect with his son is part of what Ames hopes to do in writing this letter. Certain ly, Ames comes close 10 transforming the sparks of fire. the often misguided energies toward God's will: "The idea of grace had been so much on my mind, grace as a sort of ecstatic fire that takes things down to essentials" (Gilead 197). As Betty Mensch notes in her revie\'/ of Gilead and JOllathall Edwards: A Life, Ames is a man who "once wrote a fiery Edwards-like sermon" and then "felt ridiculous:' which moved him toward "(I losing his habits of judgment" (237). 1hat sermon is missing from the box in the attic. Ames explains th,lI it is one he "actually burned the night before (hel meant to preach it" (Gilead 41). He now regrets that it is lost: "I wish [had kept it, because J meant every word. It might have been the only sermon I wouldn't mind answering for in the next world. And I burned it" (43.) Perhaps burning the sermon and haVing it only in his memory helps Ames to imagine that it may have been a sermon to be proud of, one that may have accomplished something worthy of God's attention. The fiery sermon ends up in a fire, and only the fire which destroyed the sermon can make the idea of the sermon one that might be somehow godly. The sermon itself, however, focused only on humanity's damned nature, which is why Ames burned it-to keep from hurting his congregation with more guih and shame. Again, Robinson layers meanings offire to illustrate the human cond ition and its inability to come to God on its own. Mensch reminds us of the [ayers of contraries that are built into the entire town of Gilead and

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that "in scripture, Gilead is origin of prophecy, source of refuge, but also object of prophetic condemnation" (237). Robinson embraces purifying destruction and its promise of restoration and salvation in the city on the hill, and she also encompasses a transcendent humanity. Such transcendent hope comes not only from the sentiment of Ames' narrative, but also from voices displaced into the margins of the text. While Ames looks forward with hope to imminent transformations, Jack waits in the desert of time before the civil rights movement. Even further oul in the margins are the histories of the African -Americans who were enslaved.

Ames does not address it, but Robinson's title rings of the African-American spiritual, "There Is a Balm in Gi lead";

There is a balm in Gilead To make the wounded whole There is a balm in Gilead To heal the sin -sick soul

Sometimes [ feel discouraged And think my work's in vain But then the Holy Spirit Revives my soul again

Don't e\'cr feel discouraged For Jesus is your friend And if you lack of knowledge He'll ne'er refuse to lend

If you cannot preach like Peter If you cannot pray like Paul You can tell the love of Jesus And say, "He died for all." (negrospirituals.com)

Gilead is mentioned twice in Jeremiah, both times in reference to its healing balm. The spiritual lyrics end with a c

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The healing balm of Gilead is close to the novel's foundation, one built on recognizing the histories of strife and suffering in individuals and communities, and one that transcends those struggles to celebrate the loving connection in the f\llfillment of God's promise. Ames reaches thai promise, or Promised Land, at his death, but he also offers hope for the dream of harmony to become part of Gilead for his son and the generations to come. In "Facing Reality~ Robinson suggests that to a large extent in our present culture "the sense of sickness has replaced the sense of sin, to which it was always near allied" (Death of Adam 83). She notes that some antebellum doctors identified "an illness typical of enslaved people sold away from their families which anyone can recognize as rage and grief" (83). Surely this sin-sickness is the same type she describes in the plots of Gilead and Home, each burdened with the disconnectedness of humanity, most overtly in Jack's painful inability to find a place where he can live happily together with his wife and chi ld. At the end of "Facing Reality:' Robinson asks what would happen "if we understood our vulnerabilities to mean we are human, and so are our friends and our enemies, and so are our cities and books and gardens, our inspirations, our errors. We weep human tears, like Hamlet. like Hecuba" (Adam 86). Read in this light. sin is no less painful, sins such as slavery and racism are no less evil, and misjudging is no less wrong; however. all sins are forgivable. even those that hurt most. Gilead asks readers to understand and to forgive themselves, their loved ones, and their enemies, and to rejoice in the beautiful humanity that can be found in all people and all places, just as Ames so beautifully records himself doing at the end of his letter.

I experienced a practical example of the novel's message when I used Gilead in a composition class at a college that was experiencing a hostile racial environment. During the class in which I introduced the lyrics and music of "There Is a Balm in Gilead," my students, both black and while. actually broke out into song, waved their arms above their heads, and leaned their bodies back and forth as they sang the spiritual together. They repeated the song until every student~including Christ ians. Buddhists, agnost ics, atheists, and others without religious labels- was singing as one, moving with the rhythm of the music and participating in the sea of hands and weaving. Like Ames, I may have misread that classroom moment, wanting so much to believe in the good and the healing. But, in that moment, unity and love did exist. Olhers may not const ruct their memory of that class

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the same way I do, but my memory of it is one of a mysterious uplifting happiness. Robinson's novel asks readers to seek that kind of transcendent joy, to look through a tens of love and acceptance and communion to strive to see the good, the beauty. and the love, with whatever it takes to see that, be it forgiveness. camaraderie, sol idarity, anything that allows a harmonious community to transcend enmity between people, the iniquities thaI cause rifts and morc sins against one another. Through Ames' celebration of being, Gilead offers readers a hope of balm for issues that cut as deeply as racial prejudice, a hope that all of us might understand ourselves and our neighbors better, as we move toward communities of harmony.

Perhaps my students and I experienced a literary work's power 10 move readers beyond its text, as Ann Hu lbert found herself moved at the end of the novel. In her Slate review, Hulbert commenls on Robinson's final sentiment: "What elicits tears at the book's close, I think, is a highly unusual literary experience: Robinson (in her role as author of this creat ion) allows even a faithless reader to feel the possibility of a transcendent order. thanks to which mercy can reign among people on Earth" (Hulbert).' Robinson offers in Ames a hope of finding a way to unite all people and of valu ing the collective in his time of loss and mourning. The mystery and the beauty of the collective is part of Ames' vision. Ames writes:

In every important way we are such secrets from each other, and I do believe that there is a separate language in each of us, also a separate aesthetics and a separate jurisprudence. Every Single one of us is a little civilization built on the ruins of any number of preceding civil izations ... all that reaUy just aUows us to coexist with the inviolable, untraversable, and utterly vast spaces between us. (Gilead 197)

The space between our sepa rate bodies of laws, separate understandings of truth and beauty, and our separate guilt and pains and sufferings all come together in a t ranscendent understanding of the mystery of being and how people exist at all, each person wi th his or her own "endless letter" of memories, experiences, histories, desires, hopes, and dreams.

The separation itself becomes part of the solution instead of only the problem; the inability to understand becomes part of the impetus to work toward understanding. Ames remarks, " I don't know why solitude would be a balm for loneliness, but Ihat is how it always was for me in those days" (Gilead 18-19). Ames' description of this paradox leads the reader to Robinson's vision of transcendence. When human beings come together,

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as Ames is with Lila and their son, as Ames is with Boughton, as Ames is with Jack, the distance between them is pronounced. The inability of human beings to understand one another is painfully obvious. When alone, as Ames is when he writes his letter, people can feel less lonely, because they are not phYSically confronted with the terrible chasms of misunderstanding and confusion between them, like the chasm between Ames' grandfather and his father, like the chasm between Jack and his family. Ames' grandfather's grave even holds the image of a chasm, as Ames says: "It was that most natural thing in the world that my grandfather's grave would look like a place where someone had tried to smother a fire" (SO). The presence of physical bodies makes the space between them stand out in sharp relief. When alone, individuals can imagine through the constructs of memory that they touched someone, the way Ames believes his father touched him with the ashy communion biscuit, the way Ames hopes to connect with his son over the years, and the way Ames purports to connect with "his !lock."

As he explains to the reader, "This habit of writing is so deep in me, as you will know well enough if this endless letter is in your hands" (Gilead 40). Although he cannot phYSically or literally span lime. Ames hopes his record of thoughts and memories and love can reach his son through this letter, full of both mourning over the fact that his life only eclipses his son's, and full of hope that he can express what he intends to his son. Ames tells his reader, "For me, writing has always felt like praying, even when I wasn't writing prayers, as I was often enough. You feel like you are with someone" (J 9). Perhaps one reason Ames writes as if he were praying is because he faces such a great challenge in attempting to communicate with his son and because he wants so badly for his communication to be Significant and profound, a way to share thoughts about his life, his loves, and his values. In Robinson's Christian vision, it seems one does not have to articulate one's beliefs clearly, or even at all, in order to be saved. Just as fire can both destroy and create anew, words can both damage people and help move them toward understanding. Ames repeatedly comments on ways Lila is not very articulate, and he recognizes that she is embarrassed by her poor grammar and usage. On the other hand, he often also exclaims how well she can articulate some of the deepest most complex ideas, especially those about her salvation. In Home, Gilead's companion text about the same characters from a different perspective set in the Boughton hOllse, Robinson develops further the parable of the prodigal son which she begins in Gilead to illustrate that, unlike the Puritan belief in the elect and one's assurance of that position through one's articulation of one's beliefs, all are invited to come 10 the river, not only those who attempt to articulate clearly the path

278 CHRISTI ANITY AND L ITERATURE

10 get there. In Gilead, Robi nson uses Ames' voice to express with erudi te fervor and from wise experience the ways a Christian lives in a world filled with both menace and hope and is paradoxically saved not by his or her own actions but passively by the very nature of God's grace.

When fire imagery interplays with racial conflicts in the civil rights era in this novel, it reveals disconnects between characters and ideas, especially between characters who long to be toget her, such as Ames and Robert, as well as Jack and both his families. Robi nson reflects in a varietyo( characters the desire to be understood. Just as Ames repeatedly wishes his son Robert can understand and can see what he means, so his namesake, Jack, also wishes he could be seen and understood. Ultimately, Ames offers hope for understanding as a spiritual fire that is present in all: "When people come to speak to me, whatever they say. I am struck by a kind of incandescence in them, the 'J' like a flame on a wick, emanating itself in grief and guilt and joy and whatever else" (Gilead 44-45). Here, fire re-presents the Christlike qualities Ames seeks to model in his behavior. It seems simplistic to sllggest that Ames is witnessing, but just like the spiritua l, "There Is a Balm in Gilead:' Ames dips into his own civilizatio n and unites with all the other fiery wicks to glow together in a spiritual incandescence of jeremiad ic drama~a perpetual destruction and reconstruction, with all the mystery ofils inex pl icable separation and restoration. Robinson's use offire imagery to illustrate the conflicti ng mysteries of both a doomed and suffering world as well as the fervent gospel of divine grace helps build her Christian vision, which, in Gilead, glories in the lamentations of human existence and the hope of fulfilling the meani ng of that existence with the promise of a new covenant, one which becomes miraculous in the very fact that it exists.

Indiana UniverSity-Purdue University Columbus

NOTES

'For an overview of research on the Holy Spirit, see Hinze and Dabney's Ad\'ellls oflhe Spirit. George T Montague's ch3pter, ~The Fire in the Word: The Holy Spirit in Scriptu re" offers a summary of ways the Holy Spirit is represented in biblic3l images. He lists the Holy Spirit's appear3nces 3S fire, which culminate in Pentecost (40).

lAs Robinson uses 1956 conventions for referring to this congregation, so J preserve the use of "Negro" when referring to this congregation and her characters.

)While J do not have space to build the argument here, I see Gilead as ajeremiad

RACE AND THEOl.OGY IN GILEAD 279

in the double sense, both a long letter of complaint and mourning which culminates in transcendence, and as a novel that participates in the tradition of the American Jeremiad, defined and developed by Perry Miller in TIle Nell' ElIglami Milld; from CololIY to Provillce and Sacvan Bercovitch's TI,e Americall Jeremiad. For a general survey of Puritan writings, see Emory Elliot's "/Ie Cambridge Introduction to Ear/y American Literature, and note page 16 of his introduction where he concisely defines the jeremiad within the larger traditions. See also Betty Mensch's review of Gilead and George M. Marsden's biography of Jonathan Edwards in which she traces ways Gilead is about Edwards and relates to his "objective reality:' I am not trying to engage fully the sermon genre of the jeremiad in this essay, but I do wish to use it to help me suggest a connection between the fire imagery and the spiritual meanings of the novel.

' For an analysis of the myth of the jeremiad for African Americans, see David Howard-Pitney, TI,e Afro-AmericclIJ Jeremiad; Appell/sfor Juslice ill America.

sSacvan Bercovitch \."rites, "Replica or mirror-reflection , representation or re-presentation: the "or~ makes all the difference in the world. More precisely, it marks the difference between this world and the next. And yet the two kinds of speech are as close as "like" and "alike." They are complementary pieces in the same game, like rook and bishop. They work together on the premise that their functions are distinct. [n order to make this as clear as possible, Church authorities from Augustine through Aqu inas made that distinction (representation or re presentation) a central tenet of Christian hermeneutics. By that rule Luther denied the Pope's right to stand in for Christ. The Holy Roman Empire, he charged, was a replica of the true church, not a re-presentation of it. The fact that it claimed to re-present the true church made it a fa lse replica, hence the Antichrist incarnate. By that rule, too, Milton justified regicide by appealing directly to Christ, the true mirror-reflection of God as king as Charles [ (in his view) was emphatically not. The fact that Charles claimed divine right disqualified him as representative of heaven's king. It is not too much to say that the hermeneutics of like-versus alike became a vehicle of theological and social transformation. Understandably, the Reformers were charged with blasphemy -- appropriately they called themselves Protest ants, Dissenters -- but so far as they were concerned, they had come to fulfill the exegetical law, not to break it" CA Mode[ ofCu[tura! Transva[uation~).

6Camden points to Julia Kristeva's revisions of Jaques Lacan to support the paradox.

' Not all reviewers find Gilead inspirational or transcendent. In his review for the Seallle TImes, Robert Allen Papinchak calls Ames one-dimensional and his narrative bland and unengaging.

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World Rhetoric:'

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Bercovit.htm >. 2 J December 2009. Camden, Vera /. "'Most Fit for a Wounded Conscience': The Place of Luther's

'Commentary on Galatians' in Grace Abounding." Renaissal1ce Quarterly 50.3 (1997): SJ9-49.JSTOR. Web.

Dirda, Michael. ~Gilead." Rev. of Gilctld by Marilynne Robinson. Was/li llgloll Post. 21 Nov. 2004; BW 15. Web. 22 December 2009.

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10 the Currellt Study of PIJcllmatology. Milwaukee: Marquette Up, 2001. Howard-Pitney, David. 711e Afro-American jeremiad: Appeals for justice in

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Mattessich, Stefan. "Drifting Decision and the Decision to Drift: The Question of Spirit in Marilynne Robinson's HOllsekeeping." Differences: A ]ollrllal of Feminist Cllllllmi Studies 19.3 (2008): 59-89.

Mensch, Betty. "Jonathan Edwards, Gilead, and the Problem of'Tradition:" Rev. of Gilelld by Marilynne Robinson and JOl1athal1 Edwards: A Life by George M. Marsden. jOl/mal of Law (lmi Religion 21.1 (2005/2006): 221-41.

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negrospirituals.com. Web. 22 December 2009. Papinchak, Robert Allen. "Gilead: A Somber Life, an Unengaging Narrative."

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Fraught with Fire: Race and Theology in Marilynne Robinson's Gilead

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